I learned early in life (from ocd parenting figures) that you have to set a certain level of clean you need in your life to how much of your life is taken up by it.
I know people who spend their entire waking hours cleaning. Can’t have 1 dirty dish. Floor cannot have a spec. Lawn must be pure green grass so kill all dandelions and any “weed” (also this is terrible for the environment but anyway). All glass absolutely spotless. Its sad how much of their life they spend just cleaning, to me anyway.
I just have a rule that I don’t let things be disgusting. Do I have dishes in the sink? Yes. Is it overflowing and molding? No. I vacuum and sweep maybe once every couple weeks or if it gets visually dirty faster.
I have way more important things in life than keeping things spotlessly clean.
Making a bed? Never done once in adult life. Complete waste of time for me. washing bedsheets and blankets, obviously yes we have to do that.
Funny enough, this threshold for what you find dirty or gross can cause a lot of relationship strife within a household as partners may have different thresholds for this.
Generally, the partner that has a lower threshold for when they feel like things are too dirty or too messy or too gross and it starts bugging them feels like they do most of the cleaning work because they start feeling stressed and end up cleaning earlier then the other.
I just have a rule that I don’t let things be disgusting.
Some people who spend their entire waking hours cleaning believe exactly the same as you. They just have different thresholds of “disgusting”. My in-laws are like that. I’m much closer to you; where I can easily accept untidy, but not dirty.
Yeah exactly. I dont allow visible dirtyness basically. So some dust, whatever. Actual dirt or mud or food crumbs? Yeah I’ll clean that.
3 dishes in sink? Its fine. 20 dishes and sink is full? Yes we need to do dishes.
It also depends on the area. I clean my kitchen more than the basement.
They just have different thresholds of “disgusting”
My gf. She mops the floor nearly every week - and it’s always a 3 step thing of heavy cleaner, some other cleaner, then water - cleans the cooktop with water and soap after every use. Dunno if her ADHD has anything to do with that
You should be cleaning the cooktop after every use. That’s basic kitchen hygiene.
Kinda hard to do when the stovetop’s still hot.
Then by the time it cools down, I’m already 3 or 4 activities past cooking and forget entirely about it…
No food you eat is going to touch it + annoying to clean, so ends up lower priority than other surfaces.
Insects love it though.
Know why it’s annoying to clean? Because you left the dirt on it for a while, and successive heat events from your regular cooking baked it into the surface.
Source: I do this, and when my partner or my mother cook, they easily wipe the surface off every time with a wet rag. I wait ages, and have to clean it with a scrubber and Jif.
Because there are hot bits you can’t touch for a while afterwards that stick out of it + control nobs.
I do get the appeal of inductions because of that, would still want analog controls for them though.
I too also have some pressing news about bed making.
A nod to my parents on this one: up until age 12 or so, it was just mattress, fitted sheet, and sleeping bag.
Mom even sewed little straps to the non-zipper side of the sleeping bag, which secured to the bedframe: kept my dumb ass from rolling out of bed without needing to screw around with rails.
Make the bed? Just pull the corner on the foot and head opposite the straps. 2 seconds, perfectly flat.
Eventually I switched to normal sheets and such cuz in my brain, sleeping bags were for kids!! …aka, the parents tricked me into wanting to make the bed cuz I’m a big boi, see?!
Well played mom and dad. 10/10
Good attempt at a lesson, terrible actual chain of logic.
The attempted lesson here is presumably that things require regular maintenance and attention, in order to keep working well, working as they have been.
So… ‘wash your bedding once a month, or after a spill or accident’… or … ‘clean your room once a week, so that it doesn’t get so messy that you lose things or trip over stuff’ … or … ‘try your best to clean up dishes and cookware and put them away soon after you use them, so that the next time you need to use them, you can usually just assume they will be usable’.
A made bed?
I mean yeah, it can be useful as a simple routine for the sake of establishing any routine, or as regular mild excercise.
But an actual bed that is unmade… being not tidy does not make it more liable to degrading over time, unless shit is literally strewn across the room.
Or… unless you have some kind of very particular linens of something, where being crumpled will ruin their structural integrity…?
I’m trying to be generous here, but I think this is just an aesthetic preference masquerading as somehow … actually functional.
Keeping your sheets and blankets clean, yeah that’s functional.
Keeping them super tidy?
OCD pretending to not be OCD.
“Exactly, there’s so much shit you have to do over and over in life, why add unnecessary things to it??”
Some people are experts at making more pointless busywork for themselves. My parents had a real knack of storing things that need to be used in one room and replaced often… as far away as possible. Like who the fuck keeps spare kitchen paper towels in the bedroom?
I’ve made a bed a handful of times in my life. The one time I remember specifically was when I had my first girlfriend over to my house when I was 17.
If you don’t want to make your bed, don’t do it. After 60 years of not making my bed, I’ve suffered zero ill effects.
Yeah it’s something for regimental types. I read something about some military dude priding himself on it.
I’m very chaotic (ADHD) so nope. I couldn’t function in a regimental environment anyway.
That’s exactly why you should not blindly follow things though. There is literally no advantage to a nicely made bed except that it looks nice. If that is not worth the effort of making the bed, then why would you do it?
In addition to letting the sheets and blankets breathe already noted, a made bed lends itself to being used for things like folding, sorting, or hanging up laundry because it is a flat surface where socks can’t get lost in folds and shirts can be laid flat before putting on hangers.
I didn’t see benefits earlier in life but now I do. By made I just mean sheets and blankets laid flat, not tucked in or anything extra. Just a few seconds of getting then spread mostly evenly.
In fact not doing it allows the mattress to dry better, after all it absorbs sweat during the night.
This is my thought. I don’t have time to go beat the mattress on the balcony, but I can leave the sheets down and the fan on.
it has an advantage for your mental health, because it helps your mood to know you have finished a task, have a routine, and cleaning.
I can see this, for certain folks. To me, I’d be mad that I’m wasting time on something totally pointless when I could be doing anything else far higher up on my importance meter.
Having to make my bed has a negative effect on my mental health. But yes, that’s why I said to evaluate it individually.
Just a pendant here. First comment does not say that.
It says that, and more.
Just a pedant here but it should be inferred from the first line.
Doing unnecessary stuff irks me in ways I can’t describe.
Because we are smart and value time.
I can’t stand actual pointless crap that wastes our lives.
But if it makes you happy, go for it I say.
It might for you. It does nothing for me.
It doesn’t help my mental health to do a pointless task.
Contrary to what JP says mental health isn’t tied to a clean bedroom, or in this case a made bed.
This really depends on the person. For some, there’s benefit to the ritual and then again for the “tidy” bed occupying their space. For others, it doesn’t matter.
My personal opinion is if you tend to not be in your bedroom except to sleep then it doesn’t matter, but if you spend much time in there then making the bed is beneficial.
nah, fuck him. but a routine definitely is.
Making your bed just means it will smell faster, you’re trapping moisture in the sheets.
Jeez, how much do you people sweat at night? I’m in a temperate climate and I only sweat at night when something’s wrong with me.
You sweat constantly, you just don’t notice it. I “don’t sweat” at night, that doesn’t mean there isn’t moisture in the sheets. Your body is a semi-permeable water sac, of course there’s going to be moisture in the sheets after spending 8 hours in them.
I sweat a fair amount at night. At this point in my life, I open the window, have a fan blowing air around the room, and sleep with minimal sheets and no clothes. I still end up sweating at some point in the night.
Mine is likely perimenopause related though.
Only if you do it right after getting up
And when are you supposed to do it otherwise? After you’ve gotten home from work?
Whenever you want? I do it when I get home from work or around lunchtime on my days off.
If those are the advantages then the same advantages could be accomplished by daily filling a cup with water, pouring out the water, drying the glass and putting it back in the cupboard. I’d argue the cup with water is far less effort and yields the same results.
i don’t know how you can make that comparison when one of those things contributes to a sense of normalcy and the other plainly doesn’t.
Because normalcy is subjective to each of us. If an unmade bed is normal in my house, then the unmade bed is what contributes to a sense of normalcy for me.
i was speaking more in relation to other people. also i don’t know anyone for whom filling and emptying glasses of water is normal.
For me living in a space that’s clean and looks nice does have a pretty big positive impact on my mental health. I feel better walking into my room to the bed being made than I do when it’s messy. Maybe everyone doesn’t get that but I would bet there are a lot of people that think they are in the “there’s no advantage” camp who actually aren’t. I thought I was that way when I was younger but when I actually started keeping up with it there was a noticeable improvement I had to acknowledge.
I make mine to keep cat hair and the occasional litter rock off of the bottom sheet.
There’s no advantage of spending half an hour in the mirror every morning doing your hair applying stucco and paint on your face, yet most people despite lacking a real practical purpose, prefer not to be seen in public looking like they just escaped the bataan death march.
A made bed airs out faster than one that’s not. The exposed bits of mattress might air out a tad bit quicker but there is no way that compensates for the area that has the bunched up duvet on it. And you mention effort. I have to shake out the duvet maybe two or three times to have it on my bed relatively straight.
This litterally takes like 5 seconds and the room looks infinitely more cared for. Nobody is that short on time.
A made bed absolutely does not air out quicker. https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(01)77320-4/pdf
The exposed bits are where you were sleeping, and it absolutely compensates for where the bunched up cloth is. And even if that bunched up cloth was a problem you can flatten that out to expose just the inside anyway, like the outside of a hard taco shell.
I make my bed purely because my wife likes it that way. I’m not bothered either way, but I do it because it’s important to her.
She wakes up before I do and goes to bed before I do. I make the bed nice and tidy when I eventually wake up so she has a nice neat bed to climb into at night.
Keep being an awesome husband brother
Is a husband-brother something they have in the South?
The process of making your bed confers several hygiene benefits.
For starters, we release a ton of water when we sleep, both through sweat and exhalation. A made bed dries more efficiently
Making the bed also has the effect of shaking loose skin and hair that came off us throughout the night, and casting it to the floor. This is especially true if you use the objectively correct technique of grabbing the corners and flipping your bedding up into the air so that it settles down into place like a parachute
Takes five seconds, looks nice as you noted, and has many other mental and social benefits we haven’t even touched on. For one of many examples, if I go to a guy’s place, I’m not gonna be inclined to get into his bed if he “won” the bed-making argument with his parents and stuck with that philosophy ever since
Wait what? Making the bed does the opposite. It traps the moisture in the bed, meaning it dries less, causing it to smell more. How the hell would making the bed cause it to dry better, that’s complete nonsense.
Edit: for those that don’t believe me, this has already been studied. Making your bed traps moisture. It’s honestly crazy to think that closing up a damp environment somehow makes it dry faster.
Think of it this way, if you soaked your entire mattress in water and then put it out in the sun, is it going to dry faster if you just leave it there or if you cut it open and expose all the insides?
You’re wondering why a completely flat piece of fabric with maximal surface area exposed to the air dries faster than one that’s bunched up and covering itself multiple times? Are there any other situations you can think of where things dry better bunched up rather than splayed out? Towels, swimsuits, tarps, tents?
Who mentioned smell by the way? Is your bedding noticeably smelly?
I just counted, if I made the bed each morning I’d be trapping the bed sheets under at least 8 other layers of fabric. A comforter, a weighted blanket, and sometimes another blanket. The weighted blanket alone has 5 layers to it, the comforter 3.
Huh? Maybe this is a country difference. If I make the bed, there’s going to be more than 3 layers of fabric on top of the sheets that were actually touching my body. There is zero chance in hell of those sheets drying faster covered up. The sheets being pulled back to expose the area that was actually touching my body is what allows it to dry.
And I didn’t see the part about the towels, usually I don’t cover up other towels with more towels while they’re trying to dry. So yes, if that was how the towels were drying, a pile of them would dry much much faster than laying wet towels on top of each other over and over again.
it feels nice to me anyway, a cluttered bed makes me anxious. plus tucking yourself into a made bed is such a nice feeling rather than trying to find your sheets in the mess
Lmao, some bitter sadsack downvoted the fact that you like a made bed.
crazy world we live in
Easily solved by not using top sheets.
You monster
Look at this guy with his fancy bottom sheets.
fancy bottom sheets
You mean like these?
Or REAL fancy like so:
A nicely made bed also feels nicer and is easier to keep clean.
Distinct layers of sheets with uniform spacing between them holds and vents heat more uniformly.
If you’ve only got one blanket probably makes no difference though.
Cleaner to lay on top of the cover if you are lounging on the bed during the day
Try a hammock. Always made, you can actually wash it (mattresses, ew). Good for your back, super comfortable.
You could also take away the opposite lesson, that society asks people to prioritize meaningless things, so there’s no reason to follow such a vapid worldview.
Even entropy isn’t what it used to be – Solomon Short
You should have seen the entropy we had back in my day! Not the flimsy kind you get nowadays!
Mao’s Little Red Book has a reminder to wipe your ass
I mean it’s a choice. I know ppl who refuse to work and collect wellfare because they’ll be poor either way.
